What the hell version of Troopers did you see (or read)? The movie was a travesty -- it seemed like they couldn't make up their minds to make fun of Heinlein's source story or follow along with it. I admit that part of the problem was Heinlein's story -- it was a shoot-em up, but with a lot of subtext as baggage. The movie ignored the subtext and did the shoot-em up part poorly.
No, that's not what it means at all. It means the ancestors of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals *began* to diverge around 500 thousand years ago -- it does not mean they didn't interbreed. While different species often can't interbreed with similar species, it often depends on how much genetic drift has occurred. It's not like a mutation happens and a switch is thrown and suddenly you can't breed with your neighbors. It's a gradual process that happens over generations with the mutation winning out over multiple back-breeding with the "parent" species.
Hello, look at lions and tigers -- definitely different species but they can still occasionally interbreed (and unlike the horse/donkey mix, their offspring can reproduce).
The fact that you were modded as "4 Informative" says much for the lack of understanding of evolution.
It is not that the world is not ready for Linux, it's that Linux is not ready for the rest of the world. That isn't a put-down, it's actually part of its strength. If Linux was ready for the world, it would just be another bloated OS like Windows. 'Everyone' shouldn't be running the same OS -- diversity is good. In ecology, healthy environments are those that display biodiversity -- the same is true of computers, think of its as cyberdiversity. And after a long dark period, we're finally starting to see some of it. Vive la difference!
Yes, and it is a good thing to stop kicking puppies, beating your spouse and/or kids, and dumping toxic waste into a stream. However, that does not mean "it is best to applaud the move." Microsoft is capable of pulling its head out of its ass for once -- so what?
I'm a web designer, so even though FF is my primary browser (and occasionally Opera), I have to download IE7 to see what it breaks. After installing it, I've noticed some rather odd issues with applications not keeping my personal settings -- everything from Dreamweaver's remote info for the sites I manage being wiped-out and unable to save them anew, to "Recent Documents" lists in a number of non-MS programs being zeroed out. Adobe's updated for Dreamweaver fixed that problem, but it does IE7 seems to be even more tightly coupled with the OS and causing shenanigans as a result.
Also, on an unrelated note - the IE7 interface is complete crap! Who the hell puts in a menu bar that is disabled by default (breaking Windows interface guidelines) and then not allow you to move it *above* the address bar! I've hated IE for many years because of its intrusive nature and poor standards support, but the only the that IE7 seems to have given me is more reasons to hate the damn thing.
And other similar needlessly and pointlessly inflammatory posts -- people, the anecdotal experience of others should not be used as the basis for any decision making process. And how this whole item is supposed to be news should be up for debate as well -- what are the editors of/. still pissed off about the Firefox pre-posting availability story?
Here's an idea, load the same three pages in tabs in the latest browsers of your choice -- personally I've done this with IE7, Opera 9.02, and Firefox 2.0. My own example is my Google personalized home page, this/. story, and timeanddate.com. Now Firefox takes up ~45M, IE takes up ~55K, and Opera takes up ~48M. Now I won't say Firefox is better and IE sucks (though that is, of course, true) -- without knowing every theme, plug-in, and add-on, as well as the configuration of each of those installations, the above numbers are meaningless.
If you're happy with Firefox, great, if you're not, too bad, and I hope you enjoy running something else - there's a lot of great choice.
HOWEVER, PLEASE QUIT POSTING YOUR OWN PERSONAL PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES AS NEWS APPROPRIATE FOR OTHER PEOPLE TO ACT ON!!!!
Yeah, it makes me cringe every time I see it. I doubt they actually use it though, and the fact that it is featured so prominently is probably evidence of the corporate deal behind it.
I suspect they actually use Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and every other resource they can find. I know a bunch of people regularly slam them for lack of proper science, research, and a host of other geeky sins, but honestly I don't see anyone else doing it better. The main goal behind the show is more 'cultivate intellectual curiousity' than 'get kids to put on a lab coat and repeat the same experiment for five years'. Considering how the poor level science education and public discussion in the US, I'll take what I can get.
But that is the great thing about the CSS standard -- if a browser does not support a class of features (i.e. like lynx with graphics and colors), a properly coded and standard compliant page will degrade gracefully. The company website I've designed is 100% standard compliant and not only degrades gracefully, but when viewed in a text-only or PDA browser re-orders the content and navigation so that it is more user-friendly with how people use those browsers.
The problem is the browsers like IE that either only partially implement features or (as is most often the case of problems with IE) implement them in a way that goes against the standard. Then you have to either start throwing in cross-browser hacks, browser specific stylesheets, or change your page design.
I will occassionally get in complaints at our webmaster account about how something doesn't render correctly in a certain browser. My reply usually includes some boilerplate about how our site is coded to support a standard, and not specific browsers. If the browser supports the standard correctly, you've got no problems. If the browser is like lynx and doesn't support CSS at all, again no problem and the pages are semantic XHTML so we make thorough use of heading tags and similar 'built-in' context indicators. If you use a browser that doesn't implement the standard correctly, on your head so be it!
of including sarcastic narration, 3D Realms will be announcing that Duke Nukem Forever will include narration by the crew from MST3K!
Yes, but not in the way the article presents it
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
WoW will be beat, but not by something that does what it does better. Instead it will be bested by something everyone hasn't seen before. I'm not talking about a new type of game, but some kind of evolution of the MMOG that someone is probably working on right now. That said, WoW is probably the ultimate within the MMOG model as it currently exists, but nothing lasts forever . . .
Yes, it is a disadvantage. Like it or not, myspace is going to be a cultural reference for teenagers today. Lack of access to what the "haves" can get to, leaves the "have nots" with yet another barrier to upward class mobility. As everyone is fond of saying, it's not what you know, but who you know. It may seem silly to you, but lack of uncensored access to online sources through public terminals reinforces the divide between classes. Technology and information only helps level the differences when those that can't afford access on their own have the ability to freely use them.
This bill is just yet another move that, despite its intent, will just reinforce the growing class divide in the US.
Didn't the guy in Roadwork end up not changing anything, and ended his life by blowing up himself and his house? This is the example to emulate? How about Guy Fawkes or the abolitionist John Brown. If you're going to incite to violence, at least pick guys who got up to some serious shit.
Hey, I never said it had to look like MS Office, as in my view that looks like crap too, just in a different way. My point was more about looking at how companies like Apple, Mozilla, and Google have created applications that look good and where the interfaces don't get in the way of the user. No interface is perfect, but those companies come a lot closer than most.
Also, since this whole thread is about OpenOffice's ad and trying to appeal to the mainstream, bringing up the fact the OpenOffice is not even close to being eye-candy is relevant. As for a feature-freeze and optimization, the damn thing is so bloated now that it's like tuning up a Hummer -- sure it runs better than an untuned Hummer, but that's about all that can be said for it.
I was not talking about Open Source in general, but OpenOffice specifically. Right now, it's bloated and slow (thus reinventing the broken wheel that is MS Office). Imagine how much cooler it would have been to use the Mozilla model and design a stable application platform, and encourage additional features to be added through extensions. Then you not only have the benefit of a faster, lighter OpenOffice suite, but a natural merit-based competition between extensions resulting in a healthier development community. I know that it is currently possible to design plug-ins for OpenOffice apps, but from what I've been able to find, it's not as easy as it should be to do, and it certainly isn't intuitive as to how to download and install them.
For example, they need to take OpenOffice Writer and strip it down until it's simply a Rich Text Format editor (a la 'WordPad' for those of you in Windoze land). Everything else should be done as extensions. Before they even think about advertising to the mainstream community, they need to lock up the geek user base (who seem to just want a RTF editor that can open and save Word docs) and then look on that as a base to expand from. They have a long way to go, and they're not going to get any closer by following the same "all things to all people" approach that Microsoft has.
In the not too distant past . . . OpenOffice people realize that people are actually expecting them to run some sort of ad using their donations
OOOOOOOOHHHHH SHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!
and they smash this traffic accident of a design together in the hopes that everyone is so horrified that someone with some brains and aesthetic sense gives them something better to use
. . . seriously, this ad is the perfect example of what is wrong with OpenOffice in comparison to Firefox:
1. OpenOffice is not as good as the commercial software it's trying to compete with, and so it is sort of hard to come up with a marketing-type message.
2. The software itself, while functional, lacks any sort of cohesive vision or raison d'etre beyond "hey, what do you want? It's free"
3. It looks like crap. I know this is hard for many of you programmers out there to hear, but if your application *looks* like crap, people are going to think it *is* crap, no matter how good it actually is.
4. Whereas Firefox took their message to the New York Times and built-up a lot of well justified hype, the OpenOffice folks came up with something that looks like a cross between a church picnic flyer and a political manifesto that maybe a dozen clueful people will read and understand.
While I appreciate your point, I believe the EFF is more like the ACLU than the AAA [alphabet soup anyone?]. I certainly wouldn't classify it as a 'membership-based' organization. No one looks at it and says "Whoa, they represent millions of people! Maybe I should listen to them." Also, their efforts are focused on only a small part of what Internet users are concerned about.
What I am suggesting is something *just like* the American Automobile Association -- in that it should be membership-based, represent a large and diverse number of people, and have enough pull that it can enter into debates like net neutrality as something more than a fringe element. AAA has something like 42 million members -- that's the kind of numbers Internet users need to be taken seriously.
One of the things that the NPR broadcasts helped to underline in my mind was the fact that there is a presumption in all the commentary on this issue so far that the battle is between the telcos (really ISPs of any stripe) and the content providers. And while these interests do represent certain vested Internet players, they ignore the group that is the predominant player on the Internet: the users. The obvious answer is that the telcos and content providers each shout with a [somewhat] unified voice, they've got the money, and they are interested in the outcome.
Where is the American Automobile Association for Internet users? I know of no such organization that is the AAA's analog in the Internet community, and just like AAA has worked on issues that effect drivers in the U.S., we need the same kind of unified lobbying force on behalf of the Internet user community. Irrespective of your stance on this issue, it should be pretty obvious that without involving the users, neither side on this debate is going to come up with a solution that benefits anyone but themselves.
<epiphany>Hey, an American Computer Association [for lack of a better name] could even use the 'roadside service' type approach that AAA uses, where if you were interested, you could pay a membership fee and get technical support in return!</epiphany>
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought an iMac for my 4 1/2 year old. Now it all balances out, right?
Close, but it's actually just the same movie you saw last week with the title slightly changed and it will open on April 1, 2007
What the hell version of Troopers did you see (or read)? The movie was a travesty -- it seemed like they couldn't make up their minds to make fun of Heinlein's source story or follow along with it. I admit that part of the problem was Heinlein's story -- it was a shoot-em up, but with a lot of subtext as baggage. The movie ignored the subtext and did the shoot-em up part poorly.
No, that's not what it means at all. It means the ancestors of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals *began* to diverge around 500 thousand years ago -- it does not mean they didn't interbreed. While different species often can't interbreed with similar species, it often depends on how much genetic drift has occurred. It's not like a mutation happens and a switch is thrown and suddenly you can't breed with your neighbors. It's a gradual process that happens over generations with the mutation winning out over multiple back-breeding with the "parent" species.
Hello, look at lions and tigers -- definitely different species but they can still occasionally interbreed (and unlike the horse/donkey mix, their offspring can reproduce).
The fact that you were modded as "4 Informative" says much for the lack of understanding of evolution.
It is not that the world is not ready for Linux, it's that Linux is not ready for the rest of the world. That isn't a put-down, it's actually part of its strength. If Linux was ready for the world, it would just be another bloated OS like Windows. 'Everyone' shouldn't be running the same OS -- diversity is good. In ecology, healthy environments are those that display biodiversity -- the same is true of computers, think of its as cyberdiversity. And after a long dark period, we're finally starting to see some of it. Vive la difference!
Yes, and it is a good thing to stop kicking puppies, beating your spouse and/or kids, and dumping toxic waste into a stream. However, that does not mean "it is best to applaud the move." Microsoft is capable of pulling its head out of its ass for once -- so what?
I'm a web designer, so even though FF is my primary browser (and occasionally Opera), I have to download IE7 to see what it breaks. After installing it, I've noticed some rather odd issues with applications not keeping my personal settings -- everything from Dreamweaver's remote info for the sites I manage being wiped-out and unable to save them anew, to "Recent Documents" lists in a number of non-MS programs being zeroed out. Adobe's updated for Dreamweaver fixed that problem, but it does IE7 seems to be even more tightly coupled with the OS and causing shenanigans as a result.
Also, on an unrelated note - the IE7 interface is complete crap! Who the hell puts in a menu bar that is disabled by default (breaking Windows interface guidelines) and then not allow you to move it *above* the address bar! I've hated IE for many years because of its intrusive nature and poor standards support, but the only the that IE7 seems to have given me is more reasons to hate the damn thing.
Boy, James Madison, George Mason, and the rest of those guys were sure forward thinking individuals! And I never even knew this was a right!
No, the GOP likes pedophiles, or at least they do if they're in Congress. I don't know how they feel about terrorists in Congress :)
And other similar needlessly and pointlessly inflammatory posts -- people, the anecdotal experience of others should not be used as the basis for any decision making process. And how this whole item is supposed to be news should be up for debate as well -- what are the editors of /. still pissed off about the Firefox pre-posting availability story?
Here's an idea, load the same three pages in tabs in the latest browsers of your choice -- personally I've done this with IE7, Opera 9.02, and Firefox 2.0. My own example is my Google personalized home page, this /. story, and timeanddate.com. Now Firefox takes up ~45M, IE takes up ~55K, and Opera takes up ~48M. Now I won't say Firefox is better and IE sucks (though that is, of course, true) -- without knowing every theme, plug-in, and add-on, as well as the configuration of each of those installations, the above numbers are meaningless.
If you're happy with Firefox, great, if you're not, too bad, and I hope you enjoy running something else - there's a lot of great choice.
HOWEVER, PLEASE QUIT POSTING YOUR OWN PERSONAL PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES AS NEWS APPROPRIATE FOR OTHER PEOPLE TO ACT ON!!!!
For a second, I thought it said "Ironic cooling . . ."
Hmm, I wonder if that would involve a black fly and some super-cooled chardonnay.
Oh, wait, that wasn't ironic after all.
Yeah, it makes me cringe every time I see it. I doubt they actually use it though, and the fact that it is featured so prominently is probably evidence of the corporate deal behind it. I suspect they actually use Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and every other resource they can find. I know a bunch of people regularly slam them for lack of proper science, research, and a host of other geeky sins, but honestly I don't see anyone else doing it better. The main goal behind the show is more 'cultivate intellectual curiousity' than 'get kids to put on a lab coat and repeat the same experiment for five years'. Considering how the poor level science education and public discussion in the US, I'll take what I can get.
But that is the great thing about the CSS standard -- if a browser does not support a class of features (i.e. like lynx with graphics and colors), a properly coded and standard compliant page will degrade gracefully. The company website I've designed is 100% standard compliant and not only degrades gracefully, but when viewed in a text-only or PDA browser re-orders the content and navigation so that it is more user-friendly with how people use those browsers.
The problem is the browsers like IE that either only partially implement features or (as is most often the case of problems with IE) implement them in a way that goes against the standard. Then you have to either start throwing in cross-browser hacks, browser specific stylesheets, or change your page design.
I will occassionally get in complaints at our webmaster account about how something doesn't render correctly in a certain browser. My reply usually includes some boilerplate about how our site is coded to support a standard, and not specific browsers. If the browser supports the standard correctly, you've got no problems. If the browser is like lynx and doesn't support CSS at all, again no problem and the pages are semantic XHTML so we make thorough use of heading tags and similar 'built-in' context indicators. If you use a browser that doesn't implement the standard correctly, on your head so be it!
of including sarcastic narration, 3D Realms will be announcing that Duke Nukem Forever will include narration by the crew from MST3K!
WoW will be beat, but not by something that does what it does better. Instead it will be bested by something everyone hasn't seen before. I'm not talking about a new type of game, but some kind of evolution of the MMOG that someone is probably working on right now. That said, WoW is probably the ultimate within the MMOG model as it currently exists, but nothing lasts forever . . .
Yes, it is a disadvantage. Like it or not, myspace is going to be a cultural reference for teenagers today. Lack of access to what the "haves" can get to, leaves the "have nots" with yet another barrier to upward class mobility. As everyone is fond of saying, it's not what you know, but who you know. It may seem silly to you, but lack of uncensored access to online sources through public terminals reinforces the divide between classes. Technology and information only helps level the differences when those that can't afford access on their own have the ability to freely use them.
This bill is just yet another move that, despite its intent, will just reinforce the growing class divide in the US.
Didn't the guy in Roadwork end up not changing anything, and ended his life by blowing up himself and his house? This is the example to emulate? How about Guy Fawkes or the abolitionist John Brown. If you're going to incite to violence, at least pick guys who got up to some serious shit.
Just go to console and type:
sv_cheats 1
enable telepathy
duh!
The sentence could just as easily read: "At its worst, [The Washington Post] is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information."
Hey, I never said it had to look like MS Office, as in my view that looks like crap too, just in a different way. My point was more about looking at how companies like Apple, Mozilla, and Google have created applications that look good and where the interfaces don't get in the way of the user. No interface is perfect, but those companies come a lot closer than most.
Also, since this whole thread is about OpenOffice's ad and trying to appeal to the mainstream, bringing up the fact the OpenOffice is not even close to being eye-candy is relevant. As for a feature-freeze and optimization, the damn thing is so bloated now that it's like tuning up a Hummer -- sure it runs better than an untuned Hummer, but that's about all that can be said for it.
I was not talking about Open Source in general, but OpenOffice specifically. Right now, it's bloated and slow (thus reinventing the broken wheel that is MS Office). Imagine how much cooler it would have been to use the Mozilla model and design a stable application platform, and encourage additional features to be added through extensions. Then you not only have the benefit of a faster, lighter OpenOffice suite, but a natural merit-based competition between extensions resulting in a healthier development community. I know that it is currently possible to design plug-ins for OpenOffice apps, but from what I've been able to find, it's not as easy as it should be to do, and it certainly isn't intuitive as to how to download and install them.
For example, they need to take OpenOffice Writer and strip it down until it's simply a Rich Text Format editor (a la 'WordPad' for those of you in Windoze land). Everything else should be done as extensions. Before they even think about advertising to the mainstream community, they need to lock up the geek user base (who seem to just want a RTF editor that can open and save Word docs) and then look on that as a base to expand from. They have a long way to go, and they're not going to get any closer by following the same "all things to all people" approach that Microsoft has.
In the not too distant past . . . OpenOffice people realize that people are actually expecting them to run some sort of ad using their donations
OOOOOOOOHHHHH SHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!
and they smash this traffic accident of a design together in the hopes that everyone is so horrified that someone with some brains and aesthetic sense gives them something better to use
. . . seriously, this ad is the perfect example of what is wrong with OpenOffice in comparison to Firefox:
1. OpenOffice is not as good as the commercial software it's trying to compete with, and so it is sort of hard to come up with a marketing-type message.
2. The software itself, while functional, lacks any sort of cohesive vision or raison d'etre beyond "hey, what do you want? It's free"
3. It looks like crap. I know this is hard for many of you programmers out there to hear, but if your application *looks* like crap, people are going to think it *is* crap, no matter how good it actually is.
4. Whereas Firefox took their message to the New York Times and built-up a lot of well justified hype, the OpenOffice folks came up with something that looks like a cross between a church picnic flyer and a political manifesto that maybe a dozen clueful people will read and understand.
While I appreciate your point, I believe the EFF is more like the ACLU than the AAA [alphabet soup anyone?]. I certainly wouldn't classify it as a 'membership-based' organization. No one looks at it and says "Whoa, they represent millions of people! Maybe I should listen to them." Also, their efforts are focused on only a small part of what Internet users are concerned about.
What I am suggesting is something *just like* the American Automobile Association -- in that it should be membership-based, represent a large and diverse number of people, and have enough pull that it can enter into debates like net neutrality as something more than a fringe element. AAA has something like 42 million members -- that's the kind of numbers Internet users need to be taken seriously.
One of the things that the NPR broadcasts helped to underline in my mind was the fact that there is a presumption in all the commentary on this issue so far that the battle is between the telcos (really ISPs of any stripe) and the content providers. And while these interests do represent certain vested Internet players, they ignore the group that is the predominant player on the Internet: the users. The obvious answer is that the telcos and content providers each shout with a [somewhat] unified voice, they've got the money, and they are interested in the outcome.
Where is the American Automobile Association for Internet users? I know of no such organization that is the AAA's analog in the Internet community, and just like AAA has worked on issues that effect drivers in the U.S., we need the same kind of unified lobbying force on behalf of the Internet user community. Irrespective of your stance on this issue, it should be pretty obvious that without involving the users, neither side on this debate is going to come up with a solution that benefits anyone but themselves.
<epiphany>Hey, an American Computer Association [for lack of a better name] could even use the 'roadside service' type approach that AAA uses, where if you were interested, you could pay a membership fee and get technical support in return!</epiphany>
Is it just me, or does this sound like a future South Park episode?
. . . oh, it's just me? Nevermind then.